Checkout Zaq's Work

Dragon Pal

UI/UX Designer

Dragon Pal By Zaq Dayton

I'm a nerd. I'm just going to be straightforward with you guys. I enjoy playing Dungeons & Dragons. It's fun to just get away, hangout with friends, joke around, and cast spells. However, my D&D experience was lacking something. It was lacking structure and organization. I love pencil and paper, don't get me wrong. But, that gets messy real quick.

Every night I play D&D I have a plethora of items and papers in front of me, cluttering the table among the clutter of everyone else's clutter. I have pencils, dice, figures, character sheets, spell sheets, spell cards, maps, an inventory list, pages and pages of campaign notes, my player's handbook, etc. The list goes on and on... This made me think. Why isn't there anything out there right now that combines all of this stuff on a tablet or mobile device? Well, there is. However, they are all extremely lacking. Plus, there isn't an existing application which adds all of these components into one. So, I thought, "Hey! I'm a designer and a developer. Why can't I make something for this?" Thus, the journey began...

The first step in creating my application was branding. This was going to be the overall foundation of everything. We're talking typography, color schemes, persona, etc. I wanted to go for a flat feel that was clean, simplistic, and fun. There were many logo iterations before I got it to where I really wanted it. I wanted text that was iconic, and I wanted a logo that went well with it. Essentially, if there wasn't room for both the graphic and the text, I could use one or the other, respectively. I mean, we're dealing with mobile design and there's already not much room to begin with!

The next step that made sense was workflows. Really nail down how the user was going to navigate the app. I wanted a login screen so he or she could login into to his or her character sheet on multiple devices without having to go through the hassle of losing everything and having to recreate one which is pretty common in D&D. "Oh crap, I don't remember what my spells were, or what was in my inventory." This is a real problem for players and Dungeon Masters. People lose things or forget to bring one piece of paper. Having so many components to a game is just a recipe for catastrophe, and that's what I'm trying to prevent here.

Also, characters die. It's the nature of the game, and you need to create new characters. Maybe you really enjoyed playing as a character in a previous campaign and you want to revive him in a future one. Maybe you just want to fool around creating characters. That's what this character list is created for. In addition, a character creator wizard (no pun intended) will be included within this application. However, I am still tweaking the workflows and user paths since D&D uses a complex system when it comes to player customization.

Right now this is the preliminary design of the main page of a character sheet. Currently, I am doing case studies and research with other players to lock in user paths and workflows during a campaign run. At present, I am developing this application with Swift for iOS devices. As an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) I am going to launch the character sheet first. Then, release the character builder, spell book, item purchaser, Dungeon Master version, and much more down the road. Therefore, please look at this item as a "work in progress" and currently in its alpha stage of development.

Customer

Zaq Dayton

Category

App Development, Web Development, UX Design, Graphic Design, Branding

Programs

Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch

Technologies

Swift, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, SASS, GIT, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP

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I would like to reinterate. Zaq is a nice guy. Reach out to him. He won't bite. Maybe you want him to help you with your website or a logo. Maybe you want his help with an app. Maybe you just want to send him a cute message. Go for it.